Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Quincy Students Have the Power

Fourth
graders at Quincy Elementary have spent the last three weeks on a project
dealing with electricity. They’ve been learning about the path electricity takes
to get to their homes by looking at circuits, conductors and insulators, and
by exploring switches, playing with magnets and
building electromagnets. They visited Jeffrey Energy Center last week, hosted
Westar Engineer Ron Gwaltney yesterday, and today they toured the Education
Station at the Kanza Science Park.

During Gwaltney’s visit to the school
yesterday, the students learned about safety and the protective equipment
linemen wear. They had the opportunity to try on some of the safety gear to see
how it protects the head, eyes, ears and hands.

At today’s visit to the
Education Station, the students learned about transmission lines (the lines that
feed electricity into the station) and about distribution lines (the lines that
carry the electricity out and into the community). They also visited the wind
turbine.

Gina Scali, the district’s 6th-12th grade consulting science
teacher, helped plan the project and was pleased with the results. “The kids
have been so excited about this. They didn’t know much about electricity before
and they asked a lot of good questions,” she said.Gwaltney was impressed,
too. “They picked up on it very quickly and, once we began talking about it,
they could anticipate what was going to happen next.”

The students will soon
be holding a mini science fair to share all the things they have learned
throughout the project.